Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop)

'Repair culture[...] is not a mere side effect of the development of industrial societies.On the contrary, it is one of the very few distributed and consistent niches of resistance against the transformation of all human creativity into quantifiable commodity.'

Felipe Fonseca talks about gambiarra and the culture of repair and how maker culture got co-opted into wastefulness and prototyping lots of new things.

https://is.efeefe.me/stuff/gambiarra-repair-culture

Good news as EU formally adopts Ecodesign measures:

- As of 2021, all TVs, monitors, fridges, freezers, washing machines, washer-dryers, dishwashers and lighting products on the EU market will have to meet minimum repairability requirements
- Manufacturers will have to ensure easy disassembly with commonly available tools.
- Spare parts and repair information will have to be made available to professional repairers for a minimum number of years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49884827
https://www.coolproducts.eu/news/eu-to-pull-plug-on-wasteful-unrepairable-products

@syndikalista Shame, would have been good to meet up!

There are some community notes on the different sessions being recorded here, I'm adding mine there: https://talk.restarters.net/t/fixfest-2019-roundup-add-your-notes-here/1984

I think slides (and possibly videos?) may be added to https://fixfest.org eventually

Jotted down my notes about configuring emacs, mu4e, mbsync and protonmail+bridge, case it's of use:

https://doubleloop.net/2019/09/06/emacs-mu4e-mbsync-and-protonmail/

Any low-bandwidth tips for Android? I need to save data.

Browsing seems to be the main culprit. I've switched off image and webfont downloads on Firefox.

Any general Android low data tips appreciated too.

I love maintenance.  I don't know why it has a bad reputation. 

There's a growing movement trying to get maintenance held again in the high esteem that it should be.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005mrj

#Maintenance #TheMaintainers

Jobs in repair, remanufacture and reuse should be part of any Green New Deal policy. They stimulate regional economies and help reduce the carbon emissions associated with the manufacture of new goods.

https://therestartproject.org/news/net-zero/

#GreenNewDeal

I'm very happy to have discovered org-super-agenda, lets you group things in logical ways in your agenda.

Definitely recommend checking it out if you use org-mode.

https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

#orgMode #emacs

One of the things I really like about indieweb is how it fosters meeting in real life. Local meetings once or twice every month, IndieWebCamps dotted throughout the year, and an IndieWebSummit once a year. Everyone is welcome to attend any of these, whether you founded the movement, or have never had your own website before.

Without counterbalances I find social media is weirdly and paradoxically alienating, so it's cool to have community baked in.

#indieweb

You rarely hear complaints about the user experience of signing up/ using email. But that's (nominally, at least, gmail black hole aside) a decentralised service. It's just because people are familiar with it and it's where people already are. If a company came along and said - hey - for email - everyone on the planet must sign up to this one megaservice to exchange emails from now on. People would say - what a terrible idea. Because people are familiar with it not working that way.

I think it's a bit of a misused and overused trope to say that people use centralised services because they have a better user experience.

The only definition of user experience that puts Facebook or Twitter ahead of alternatives is a broad definition that includes the network effect (people I know are on it) and familiarity (it's what I'm used to).

But in such a broad definition, I would then include things such as 'you manipulate me with ads', 'you steal my attention'. This is bad UX.

I'm excited for International #RepairDay this Saturday! (disclaimer: I work for a community repair organisation involved in it, but I'd be excited anyway..) Let's go slow and fix things!

https://openrepair.org/repairday

Over 120 events worldwide on the map so far https://openrepair.org/international-repair-day-map-2018/

If you want to get involved, you could
- Attend a community repair event
- Support a local repair business
- Fix something yourself
- Share a picture of your repair (successful or not!) or of a memorable repair

@bhaugen @syndikalista @guillemot Thanks Bob.

I'm quite tempted to try Patchwork, but I feel that ssb is something I'm more likely to use on my phone than my desktop, so I'll hold out for Manyverse to get there.

(side note: always very impressed by Staltz's ability to communicate techy issues)

Sheeeittt. org-trello is pretty rad. I basically thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could sync work Trello boards with my org files at work, and lo and behold .. some badass has already written a package for it. Vive la FLOSS! Vive la APIs!

It's pretty remarkably full featured two-way sync. Doesn't do everything exactly as I want, but still will be really helpful for me at work I think.

http://org-trello.github.io/

Any radical, international, distributed/federated free online universities exist?

If not, why not?

Stir To Action's new issue is on the way, with a focus on the strength of co-operation in a crisis. (Disaster collectivism rather than disaster capitalism). Even an article by Rebecca Solnit. Been loosely thinking about this for a while, definitely looking forward to this issue covering it. https://www.stirtoaction.com/issues/co-operatingoutofcrisis

International Repair Day on the way! https://ifixit.org/blog/11451/save-the-date-international-repair-day-is-october-20/

Apparently Jeff Bezos makes $28,000 (the median yearly salary of an Amazon employee) every 9 seconds.

He's on the way to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

The inequality is mind boggling. How do you actually, concretely, undo this kind of madness?

"..the commons didn’t fail because of a breakdown in trust and cooperation by the commoners but instead the commons were enclosed, stolen and shut down by capitalists, imperialists and various species of the rich and powerful. The whole debate around ‘the tragedy of the commons’ is perhaps irrelevant. [..]The commons are something that we have to fight for, the tragedy is not misuse or failure which can be investigated by game theory, but the brutality of class warfare." Derek Wall #ReadingGroup

I like the co-operative principles, and particularly #7 ("Co-operatives work for the sustainable development of their communities") - but I think it should give a nod to remote communities and the planet as a whole. Is it implied perhaps? I suppose you could loosely interpret "community" as you want.

(https://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative-identity-values-principles)